South Korea, where p2p Rulz!
p2pnet.net New Feature:- p2pnet is based in British Columbia in Canada, and so was David Tees. We’re on Vancouver Island and he was about one-and-a-half hours away by ferry in Vancouver on the mainland.
We keep saying ‘was’ because David is now in South Korea, from whence he’ll be posting on p2pnet from time to time.
It’ll be great getting copy from that part of the world where attitudes and events are very, very different and where p2 and file sharing are integral to life as Koreans understand it : )
Here’s David’s first contribution >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Here, everybody and their grandma knows how to use a computer.
Out of 50 million Koreans, 80% of them have a 3G CDMA colour screen cellphone from Samsung, LG or Motorola. 13 million have broadband access from the home and there’s literally a PC cafe on every corner full of Koreans smoking and playing online games, 24/7.
In addition to private institutions (called ‘hogwons’ ) that teach English (a source of income for many westerners in Korea), there are many hogwons that also specialize in teaching web-page design, desktop publishing and networking to students as young as five years old.
With the same zeal as North American parents putting their children in after-school programs such as soccer or other sports related activities, Korean children are carted off to academies to study a wide range of subjects from the moment they get up in the morning until the moment they go to bed at night.
Some kids don’t make it home until 11 or 12 at night so it’s a small wonder that in less then 20 years, South Korea has gone from a dictatorship to a leader in the Asian economy and technological fields.
In fact, it’s come farther in 20 years then all of western society has come in 50 years.
You have to see it to believe it.
In the past couple of millennia, Korea has been invaded and ruled by both the Chinese and Japanese. But now the tables have turned with Korea leading a social invasion of Asia dubbed the Korean Wave. All forms of media, from music and television to the latest online games made in Korea have swept across like a tsunami and are the most popular forms entertainment in Asia.
‘Piracy’ is rampant, mostly due to the stupidity of the cartels themselves.
Hollywood movies are advertised the same as in North America, but frequently, those same movies are released weeks, even months later than in North America.
A short trip to Seoul’s Yongsan Subway station will present you with all the latest blockbusters at prices far less than a night at the movies – often with Korean subtitles added in. In addition, in the same station is a market of electronic goods larger (buildings more than six stories high spread over several city blocks) than anything you could imagine in North America.
With so much competition, prices are rock-bottom.
For many, especially westerners, the most popular way of obtaining these forms of entertainment is by file sharing.
TV shows, if they’re even on TV, are often two or three seasons out of date. And trying to find the latest Coldplay or White Stripes album in stores is impossible. Don’t even think about it. The ONLY way to stay in touch with ‘home’ is to download from the p2p networks.
In short, until people here in South Korea are provided with alternatives by the cartels, p2p is here to stay – out of sheer necessity.
For Koreans, who are used to buying counterfeit brand name clothes, file sharing isn’t seen at all as being wrong, let alone illegal.
On Korean blogs, people often have copyrighted songs playing in the background and regularly email or share music through blogs or Korean-built file sharing programs such as Sorbida.
Many bars have computers hooked into the Net for customer use and run file sharing programs to download music that’s played over the bar’s sound system.
It’s the ultimate jukebox.
Instead of looking through a limited selection of songs, just run a search and download whatever you want to hear.
Korean ISPs make no effort to stem the flow of shared files and many attempts to do are simply ignored. The cartels can sue all the people they want, but here in Korea at least, the ability to sue and the ability to collect are two very different things.
Power to the people.
(Cheers, David. And thanks : )
David Tees, p2pnet – Bucheon, South Korea
[Tees is an ESL teacher, as well as a self-described computer geek. When he's not bastardizing the basics of the English Language to eager Korean students, he's fixing computers for fellow expatriates and working on his web site.]
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August 10th, 2005 at 7:52 pm
I give it a decade max, maybe two, before these powerhouses of asia start pulling ahead of the DMCA crippled USA.
Then we’ll get to see what’s what. Hopefully their politicians will have mercy on us, and force us to reform our copyright properly in their FTA’s in the next couple decades.
August 10th, 2005 at 9:59 pm
We All Live in Walmartville. Like that song says, we have lost our culture. The previous poster is right in the fact that we will become a technological backwater. I say this because most Americans are very shortsighted. We have been trained by the cartels to expect instant gratification.
Our training is what allows the cartels to muscle out the small, more innovative companies by giving customers instant incentive to choose cartel product over independent products even in cases where customers will be screwed in the long run. Americans will turn away from a $35 product and spend $250 on a crappier product rather than spending the time to research advantages and disadvantages of each product.
An example of this is the fact that people simply refuse to spend the time to learn Linux. Someone could spend a month getting used to using Linux and be done with all the malware, DRM, vendor lockin, Micro$oft spying, and exorbitant software prices. But no, they would rather put up with all of that crap simply because they don’t want to learn how to single click instead of double click or read a book or two.
I prefer to keep up with the rest of the nations instead of becoming obsolete.
August 11th, 2005 at 12:57 am
i agree totally however i use winblows just because its the only platform on computers for gaming and linspire does not support many of the games so im preety much stuck i feel this represents a large porportion of the winblows users out there. if there was a way to convert the games to linux however id be over in a second anyone got suggestions?
August 11th, 2005 at 3:50 am
Prehaps a program that can be added to Linux called wine. Wine allows linux users to use windows programs. Some with more success than with others.
I am another that has given up on windoze as just being to much hassel in dealing with malware and the expense of constant updates of malware preventers while trying to keep some sort of security and safety on your box. Having a recent game to play isn’t worth the trouble that comes with it in the forum of an OS that is continually a security hole. Having that transfer through a home network is no bargain just to have the ablility to play a game. Simply the work required to fix what the holes have allowed in isn’t worth my time and effort to deal with on a continual basis. Allow that the OS isn’t cheap to begin with and that I expect quite a bit more than I am getting for the money with Windoze and it becomes an excerise in futility when dealing with it.
I’ll pass from now on when dealing with propriority software the likes of Windoze that doesn’t allow me the safety and control of my box in the interest of the dollar.
August 11th, 2005 at 11:53 am
Then you really need to pay a visit to the guys over at Transgaming Tech (http://www.transgaming.com) makers of Wine (the most recent version being called Cedega).
Windows people have no excuse anymore. There are alternatives. Even for games. Of course, not all games work perfectly under Wine, but if you try one out and it doesn’t work, you can always send the data to the Transgaming community, and see if people can help to fix it. Not only for you, but for other people in the future too, who would also like to play a game that’s not playable at the moment. It’s a project that is always in the making, and it only gets stronger as more people get onboard and support the community.
The only excuse to stick with Windoze is lazyness. Linux can do everything Windoze does, better, and it can do even more. All that for free (although SOME things you have to pay for, but it’s mostly for support – Linux support is very thorough, not the MS “make sure you plugged your mouse up right, if not reboot, if it doesn’t work, re-install” way kind of ’support’), and you also get to strengthen, not a company or multi-billionaire, but yourself and millions of people in the Linux community worldwide.
Also, there are some games that are available for Linux, some are for free, some you can buy. A lot are ports of standard Win games, some only need a client to run the original Windoze version’s game data (as is the case with DOOM 3 or Neverwinter Nights , so you still need the original CDs), others are completely new and exclusive to Linux.
The thing is, Linux will only get better as more people join and start learning how to use their computers again. People got lazy when Windows 95 hit the shelves. It’s time they learned how to use a computer again, and got the power back into their own hands.
August 11th, 2005 at 1:49 pm
Actually Transgaming doesn’t make Wine they just make some contributions to Wine, probably U should see http://winehq.org/ for Wine